Spatial Awareness #6 — Maps & Spatial Newsletter by Robin Hawkes

Welcome to Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each issue I’ll highlight the most interesting and inspiring things that I’ve found — cool demos, new tools, tutorials, beautiful maps, interviews, behind-the-scenes and more.

As I write this the world is celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The Internet is currently buzzing with interesting and amazing celebrations of the momentous event, including a lot of maps — some of which I’ll be featuring today.

One non-map resource related to the landing that I recommend checking out is Apollo 11 in Real Time — it’s a beautifully-crafted website that has all the audio and visual recordings of the mission playing back in real time. You can even interact with the timeline to jump around as you please. It’s easy to forget that you’re experiencing an event that happened 50 years ago.

So as always, sit back and join me on this periodic journey through the world of maps. And remember, you can unsubscribe at any point if you’re not finding this useful.

One last thing — you can reply directly to me via this email if you have content suggestions, questions, or just want to say hi. Lots of you have done this so far. Don’t be shy! 👋

I featured the Ordnance Survey map of the Apollo 11 lunar landing site back in the first issue. It’s a great map! This story map from them is a further celebration of the landing and looks into the importance of Moon maps and how they created their own.

You may have noticed that I’ve featured John Nelson’s maps before. This time I wanted to feature John’s awesome map of the Appalachian Trail and his guide on how he created it. Would love to see more maps created (and printed) like this. Great idea!

I love this map, not for its looks but instead for the novelty and technicality. It shows all the lighthouses from OpenStreetMap and uses signal sequence data (if available) to accurately flash the lights as they would in reality. It’s quite hypnotic.

Have you made an interesting map recently?

I’d like to highlight more maps from the subscriber community. Don’t be shy! Either reply to this email or contact me on Twitter.

I’ve been an admirer of this print by Paul Button since the original version was released a few years ago. He has released a new white and gold version on July 20th in celebration of the Apollo 11 anniversary. It’s a limited edition so snap one up fast if you’re interested.

This thread on Twitter by Helen Metcalfe looks into jet streams, atmospheric turbulence, and climate change. It’s not strictly related to maps but there are certainly some interesting maps referenced throughout the discussion.

There are countless Web mapping frameworks out there to choose from — too many. Fortunately James Milner has our back and has put together some examples of how to create basic maps using the most popular mapping frameworks. Thanks James!

If you want a detailed review of all the new things in ArcGIS API for JavaScript then look no further. From huge performance improvements, to time sliders, to a wealth of new 3D functionality — this is a huge update. I’m excited to check it all out.

Mapbox have pushed a new update for Mapbox GL JS that introduces a variety of minor improvements. The performance updates are very welcome, as well as the usability improvements in terms of new API methods and fixes for mobile devices.

Continuing with the theme of space and moons, this interactive article from National Geographic is a fantastic overview of the moons of our solar system. The atlas contains detailed and visually-stunning 3D maps of the major moons, amongst a whole wealth of other information about them.

This article on naval navigation provides insight into just how difficult it was for sailors — in a time long before GPS — to work out where they were and how to get from point A to B (and back again). Even today most people probably wouldn’t be able to do it without the use of a modern calculator — it’s kind of crazy to think this was all done using brainpower and calculation tables.

If you’ve been involved in 3D graphics on the Web then you might already be aware of glTF and the benefits that it brings with it. If not, then this article provides some insight into the well-supported 3D format and how it’s now integrated in Uber’s vis.gl suite of spatial and data visualisation tools.

Geoff Boeing has put together a dataset containing a road network graph for the entire US. I find road network graphs incredibly interesting, especially once you start to use them for practical purposes such as routing and other kinds of analysis.

Future Cities Laboratory are looking to fill a variety of roles in Singapore. The roles are primarily for software development related to their Digital Underground project — an effort to create a reliable map of subsurface utilities for planning and land administration.

The University of Twente in the Netherlands are looking for an Assistant Professor of Photogrammetry to assist with education, research, and consulting related to the extraction of large scale geo-information from imaging sensors. Applications are open until the 28th of August.

Topi Tjukanov is a prolific map-maker and someone who is incredibly active in the spatial scene. His maps and spatial visualisations are varied and often utilise cutting-edge techniques and technology. Definitely one to follow.

Who inspires you from the community?

I can only highlight the people that I’m aware of, so get in touch if you have someone you admire in the community who deserves some recognition. You can reply to this email or contact me on Twitter.

Recently Swisstopo released a beta version of their mapping tool for public testing. The latest version uses vector tiles, which allows them to implement functionality that was difficult or impossible to achieve in the old version. Feedback is being accepted until the end of August.

No doubt you’ve seen a map recently using the Equal Earth projection. Tom Patterson has put out call for people to volunteer with language translation of the Equal Earth maps. It’s not a simple task, though no doubt for a good cause.

Spatial Awareness on Slack

I’ve set up a Slack chat for the Spatial Awareness community to talk maps and help shape future issues of the newsletter. Please join if you’d like to be part of that community and have a direct channel of communication with me. I’ll also be sharing early access to issues with a select group who are happy to help me proofread and generally double-check things.

We’ve already got a large group of people signed up with a wide variety of expertise. You can join here — I’m looking forward to seeing you!

That's a wrap

I’m starting to find a routine with these issues now — they’re coming together a lot quicker and don’t take up quite as much time and energy from me each week. The good thing about that is that it frees me up to work on some of the other things related to the newsletter outside of written issues — interviews, a monthly ‘podcast’ roundup, and most likely a blog to centralise everything. Watch this space.

Also, I’m running a poll on Twitter to get some feedback on the length and regularity of each issue. Please take part if you think things should change — you can find the poll here.

So what do you think about this issue? What did you like? What didn’t you like? If you liked it then please click on the thumbs up button below as it helps me work out general sentiment. Plus the feedback helps give me energy to keep this going.

Don’t forget to reply to this email if you have any feedback, suggestions for content or just want to say hi. You can also reach me on Twitter, where I’m usually posting all sorts of interesting spatial-related stuff.